Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Freshet   Listen
Freshet

noun
1.
The occurrence of a water flow resulting from sudden rain or melting snow.  Synonym: spate.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Freshet" Quotes from Famous Books



... hear 'em over and over every day, the same everlastin' round, and you would think the topics not so many arter all, I can tell you. It soon runs out, and when it does, you must wait till the next rain, for another freshet to ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... abandoned some time, and consisted of the remains of an old Indian mound, partly washed away by the river, which had been fashioned into a two-gun battery, with a small magazine. The ground to its rear had evidently been overflowed during the late freshet, and led to the removal of the guns to Eastport, where the batteries were on high, elevated ground, accessible at all seasons from the country to ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... opening out at intervals into pocket-like valleys, such as the broad and fertile flat which lay below Hidden Water. On either side of the stream the banks rise in benches, each a little higher and broader and more heavily covered: the first pure sand, laid on by the last freshet; the next grown over with grass and weeds; the next bushed up with baby willows and arrow weed; and then, the high bench, studded with mesquite and palo verdes; and at the base of the solid rim perhaps a higher level, strewn with the ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge

... where there is no thought of art or oratory. Where the remarks are of an explanatory nature the words come slowly and carefully. When persuasion becomes the object, deliberation is thrown aside and words begin to flow like a mountain freshet, and if the speaker has natural capacity he concludes his point with a grand rush that carries everything ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis

... wife to leave her fishing, but she talked saucily to him. So Aiai called upon the names of his ancestors. Immediately a dark and lowering cloud drew near and poured out a flood of water upon the stream, and in a short time the dam was broken by the freshet and all the oopu and opae, together with the child, were swept toward the sea. But the woman was not taken by the flood. Aiai then rose up and departed, without thought ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various

... in a dead faint when I spun by the crowd; but land! you can't drownd some folks, not without you tie nail-kags to their head an' feet an' drop 'em in the falls; I've rid logs down the b'ilin'est rapids o' the Kennebec an' never lost my head. I remember well the year o' the gre't freshet, I ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... in, and provided for her until she could work for herself. At last she went to live on one of the hills that you can see near the iron mine. She did pretty well that winter; but one day in the spring, a great freshet ruined every thing that she had, and almost carried away her house. Afraid to stay on the hill any longer, she was about to go to the city, and ask assistance from the societies which give help to poor people, when some persons, told her to move to the cottage ...
— The Summer Holidays - A Story for Children • Amerel

... and a "Resources of Tennessee" comprised the library on the shelf. The Almanac had come by mail from away off yonder, about a hundred miles, perhaps—anyhow, from New York. The "Resources of Tennessee" had come down with a spring freshet in Jackson River, and was rather stained with mountain clays. The Bible was, of course, ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears

... and the pledges given by some of my college friends. But within a year the whole thing was dead. Several of the men who had been loudest in their expressions of penitence and determination to accept Christianity became worse than ever: they were like logs stranded high and dry after a freshet. ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... all drowned. The sea was undivided from the bay. Pungy boats and canoes drifted helplessly along the coast, and the Eli alone was out of danger in the harbor of New York, waiting to receive young Abraham. At last the freshet crept over the house-tops, and nothing remained but the cottage of the Jew, planted on piles, which lifting it higher than the surrounding houses, yet threatened it the more if the water should float it from its pedestal and send it to sea. Every effort ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... freshet. The Ohio was on a rampage—a turbulent, coffee-colored stream, it had risen far beyond its usual boundaries, washed out the familiar land-marks, and, still insolent and greedy, was licking the banks, ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.

... additional transgression of poaching, and to give you a few extracts from a sermon a friend of mine once delivered. [It was addressed to a small congregation of Monothelites in a village "out West," just after the annual spring freshet, when half the inhabitants of the place were down with the chills and fever. It was his maiden effort,—he having just left the Seminary,—and did not "take" at all, as he learned the next day, when ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... withdrew. At a single bugle-call it was electrified. It remained in no fixed place, but, like a wave, enveloped a hill, or with galloping horses and cheering men overwhelmed a valley. In comparison, this trench work did not suggest war. Rather it reminded you of a mining-camp during the spring freshet, and for all the attention the cavemen paid to them, the reports of their "seventy-fives" and the "Jack Johnsons" of the enemy bursting on Mont de Lorette might have come ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis

... man was the friend alike of my father, my elder brothers and ourselves. He was of an age with each and every one of us. As any piece of stone is good enough for the freshet to dance round and gambol with, so the least provocation would suffice to make him beside himself with joy. Once I had composed a hymn, and had not failed to make due allusion to the trials and tribulations of this world. Srikantha ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore

... time after the incidents just narrated the life of our hero rippled—but of course it must be clearly understood that a Suakim ripple bore some resemblance to a respectable freshet elsewhere! Osman Digna either waited for reinforcements before delivering a grand assault, or found sufficient entertainment to his mind, and satisfaction to his ambition, in acting the part of a mosquito, by almost nightly harassment ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne

... the opinion that the danger was not so great as might be supposed. There would be no pollution from those bodies taken from the river before decomposition set in, and the force of the freshet would tend to clear the river bed of any impurities in it rather than make new deposits. The argument which had the most weight, however, with the President was the efficiency of the local authorities. Pennsylvania has a State Board of Health and is a State with ample means at her disposal, ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... all events, he walked down to the bank. There it ran, broad, rapid, and in places apparently deep. He looked up and down in vain: no lodged drift-wood; no fallen trees; no raft or wreck; a recent freshet had swept all clear to high-water mark, and the stream rolled, and foamed, and boiled, and gurgled, and murmured in the afternoon August sun as gleefully and mockingly as if its very purpose was to baffle the wearied youth who looked into and over ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle

... set in the old King's mood, And a sweet Spring freshet came Into his eyes, and his heart renewed Its love for the favored dame: But often he has been heard to declare That "he never could clearly see How, in the deuce, such a strange affair Could have ended ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley

... is out in the kerosene district. I finds myself face to face with a hunk of corned beef as big as my two fists, boiled Murphies, cabbage and canned corn on the side, bread sliced an inch thick, and spring freshet coffee in a cup you couldn't break with an ax. Lizzie, the waitress, was chewin' gum and watchin' to see if I was one of them fresh travelin' gents that would try any funny ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford

... the thicket of young willows from all curious eyes. There was no hope that my voice would penetrate to the other side of the stream, neither could I reach the water beyond the soft ooze. Being well provisioned, however, it would be an easy matter to await the rise of the river; and if no friendly freshet sent me the required assistance, the winds would harden the ooze in a few days so that it would bear my weight, and enable me to escape from my ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop

... thousands. Like Colonel Sellers, he must have something with "millions in it." Almost any proposition that seemed to offer these possible millions appealed to him, and in his imagination he saw the golden freshet pouring in. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... lord decree advance Into the enemy's land; artillery, bayonet, lance; His ordering fingers point the dial's to time their ranks: Himself the black storm-cloud, the tempest's bayonet-glaive. Like foam-heads of a loosened freshet bursting banks, By mount and fort they thread to swamp the sluggard plains. Shines his gold-laurel sun, or cloak connivent rains. They press to where the hosts in line and square throng mute; He ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... in midstream subaqueous mosses, now revealed and starved by the drought, died hard, and the seeds of grasses, figworts, and persicarias thrust up flower and foliage, flourishing in unwonted spots from which the next freshet would rudely tear them. Insect life did not abundantly manifest itself, for the day was sunless; but now and again, with crisp rattle of his gauze wings, a dragon-fly flashed along the river. Through these scenes the Teign rolled drowsily and ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... diamond banks unfold, And Paraguay's deep channel paved with gold, Saw proud Potosi lift his glittering head, And pour down Plata thro his tinctured bed. Rich with the spoils of many a distant mine, In his broad silver sea their floods combine; Wide over earth his annual freshet strays, And highland drains with lowland drench repays; Her thirsty regions wait his glad return, And drink their future harvest from ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... supposed by high military authority that but for the providential freshet, Sheridan would have succeeded in crossing the James River, and cutting the Danville Railroad, which would have deprived Lee's army of supplies. The freshet rendered his pontoon bridge too short, etc. This may be claimed as a ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones

... know, the ground here is very shaky, and the swamp beneath the shores of the trees is softer than porridge. A long time ago, during a heavy spring freshet, the river became dammed about a quarter of a mile from the lake, and the whole body of water was turned in another direction. But instead of flowing over the land, it sank into the great mass of soft bog below, and forced its way underground, till it reached ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins

... laughed Holcomb. "You fellows must have been drowned out last night; the log over the South Branch is gone in the freshet; we had to get round the best way we could. Step up, Freme," he said. "I want you to know Mr. Thayor. This is Freme Skinner, Mr. Thayor, and this is Hite Holt, and there's no better ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith

... river attains its greatest height towards the end of August; at Cairo and in the Delta not until three weeks or a month later. For about eight days it remains stationary, and then begins to fall imperceptibly. Sometimes there is a new freshet in October, and the river again increases in height. But the rise is unsustained; once more it falls as rapidly as it rose, and by December the river has completely retired to the limits of its bed. One after another, the streams which fed it fail or dwindle. The Tacazze is lost ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... was creeping along foot by foot, impeded by a freshet of vehicles that filled the street. In the car was a chauffeur and an old gentleman with snowy side whiskers and a Scotch plaid cap which could not be worn while automobiling except by a personage. Not even a wine agent would ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

... way from Topeka, Kansas, thinking she was goin' to find a respectable home, and when she come out hyear and found the place was a dance-hall, she cried all the time. She didn't add none to the hilarity of the place. An' one day Jim he strolled in, an' seem' the girl a-cryin' like a freshet and wishin' she was dead, he inquired the cause. She told him how that old harpy wrote her, an', bein' an orphant, she come out thinkin' she was goin' to a respectable place as waitress, an' Jim he 'lowed it was a case for ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... if he asked me. It would be like marrying a tree that the freshet was rolling about. I'm not going to seek and ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock

... the horses, thinking of the Salinas and its treacherous waters. In California, when the ground is well sodden, a very small storm will create a very big freshet. At such times most rivers are dangerous to ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell

... stand and to think of all that has happened since the man of our thoughts looked forth from these windows, a common little boy. The world is very much alive in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello; the little freshet of life that flows there flows loud and incessant; and yet into what oceans of death and silence has it not poured since it carried forth Christopher on its stream! One thinks of the continent of that New World that he discovered, and all the teeming millions ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... arches, one of the most important is the St Louis bridge over the Mississippi, completed in 1874 (fig. 29). The river at St Louis is confined to a single channel, 1600 ft. wide, and in a freshet in 1870 the scour reached a depth of 51 ft. Captain J.B. Eads, the engineer, determined to establish the piers and abutments on rock at a depth for the east pier and east abutment of 136 ft. below high water. This was effected by caissons with air chambers and air ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... too, of what the struggle meant for him: how it drove him unquiet about the world, if somewhere he might meet with a climate to repair the constant drain upon his feeble vitality; and how at last it flung him, as by a "sudden freshet," upon Samoa—to die "far from Argos, dear land ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... for some secret panel that might open in the walls and give her escape. She must think! There was little enough time at best to bring order out of this panic-ridden confusion of her thoughts. But her mind was like a stream in freshet. It could only race and swirl along one channel, and that was the spillway ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... two days at Smaldeel, the Guards set out for Kroonstad on the Valsch or False River, so called because in some parts it so frequently changes its channel that after a heavy freshet one can seldom be quite sure where to find it. This march of sixty-five miles was covered in three days and a half; Smaldeel seeing the last of us on Wednesday and Kroonstad seeing the first of us about noon on Saturday. ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry

... of that other story that Hank Simons told me,—the one about the mill back of Woodstock caving in from the freshet and burying the miller's girl. No one dared lift the timbers until Jonathan crawled in. The child was pinned down between the beams, and the water rose so fast they feared the wreckage would sweep the mill. Jonathan clung to the sills waist-deep in the torrent, ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith

... his clean-cut face, and the look in his eyes—so vastly superior to any look that ever came into the eyes of Bream Mortimer. She was telling herself that her relations with Sam were an idyll; for, being young and romantic, she enjoyed this freshet of surreptitious meetings which had come to enliven the stream of her life. It was pleasant to go warily into deep lanes where forbidden love lurked. She cast a swift side-glance at her father—the unconscious ogre in her fairy-story. What would he say if he knew? But Mr. Bennett did ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse

... be still and quiet, Do not heed the wind and freshet, Nature wide is now fast sleeping, Why art thou so live and stirring? All commotion now is ending, Why ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins

... party, in national convention assembled at Chicago, had been in the throes of labor. It had been expected—in fact had been as good as promised—that by ten o'clock that evening the deadlock would melt before a sweetly gushing freshet of party harmony and the head of the presidential ticket would be named, wherefore in the Evening Press shop a late shift had stayed on duty to get out an extra. Back in the press-room the press was dressed. A front page form was made up and ready, ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb

... a rushing sound in the water awoke me—a sudden boisterous disturbance of the river current—probably the onslaught of a freshet: a thing that often happens at this season. One's feet on the planking of the boat become aware of a variety of forces at work beneath it. Slight tremors, little rockings, gentle heaves, and sudden jerks, all keep me in touch with the pulse ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore

... o'clock, and, after descending strong and rapid waters for a distance of about fifteen miles, reached the site of a saw mill. A Mr. Wallace, who with ten men was in charge of it, and was engaged in reconstructing a dam that had been carried off by the last spring freshet, represented Messrs. Rolette and Lockwood of Prairie du Chien. Another mill, he said, was constructed on a creek just ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... a spot that they thought would be all right for Mary, and not close enough to disturb the Bass and the Kingfisher, rolled two logs, and fished a board that had been carried by a freshet from the water and laid it across them, and decided that would have to serve until ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter

... They are therefore among those accidents of the ground which, duly improved, can seriously affect military operations. The destruction of a bridge impedes the transport of troops and supplies; a sudden freshet, occurring in the midst of an extensive movement, may imperil an army by sundering its forces; while of the utility of such natural trenches to the purposes of shelter and of defence, of awaiting attack, or resisting an advance, both the ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan

... bottom of the steep road is a bridge across the creek; or, at least, what was once a bridge, for a freshet or something seems to have torn it partially up. Originally built by throwing tree-trunks across from bank to bank, and covering these with planking, what we now see seems little more than a bare skeleton; for nearly all the planking is ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay

... highfalutin, I submit the following: "The spirit of departed day had joined communion with the myriad ghosts of centuries, and four full hours fled into eternity before the citizens of many parts of the town found out there was a freshet ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)

... head. But alas! in going up the smooth, slippery, treacherous rock, the encumbrance of her cloak—it might be such a trifle as her slung hat—something at any rate, took away her evenness of poise; the freshet had frozen on the slanting stone, and was one coat of ice; poor Nest fell, and put out her hip. No more flushing rosy color on that sweet face—no more look of beaming innocent happiness;—instead, there was deadly pallor, and filmy eyes, over which dark shades seemed to chase ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various

... take to paper money. There are no Greenbackers among them. In the letters of General Washington we find a great many requests to Congress for a kind of money that would pass current anywhere, and suffer no deterioration at the bottom of a river in a freshet. He preferred gold as being the "most portable." He wrote in 1778 ...
— Revolutionary Heroes, And Other Historical Papers • James Parton

... another man by the name of Thomas Galbraith, undertook to build a mill upon Cove Creek. They had nearly completed it, having expended all their slender means in its construction, when there came a terrible freshet, and all their works were swept away. The flood even inundated Crockett's cabin, and the family was compelled to fly to a neighboring ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott

... prowled, owls hooted, and the big dog outside was a needful defender, even in summer time, and in winter the cold was piteous, the wet even worse, and they often lost some of their precious animals—chickens died of cold, and once three lambs had been carried away in a sudden freshet. Yet Patience, when she saw Steadfast convinced, made up her mind to stand by him, and defended him ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge

... reader, too long snow-bound, must be liberated also. After the winters of deepest drifts the spring often comes most suddenly; there is little frost in the ground, and the liberated waters, free without the expected freshet, are filtered into the earth, or climb on ladders of sunbeams to the sky. The beautiful crystals all melt away, and the places where they lay are silently made ready to be submerged in new drifts of summer verdure. These also will be transmuted in their turn, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various

... dashed down the rocks. An unusual quantity of snow had lately fallen, which, having been succeeded by heavy rains, had swollen the stream to more than double its ordinary size. It was evident that, what in the language of the country is called a freshet was commencing. Such is the name given to those swellings of the water, the most formidable of which commonly occur in the month of February, or early in the Spring, when the overcharged rivers, bursting their ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... no livestock at all. They just did manage to save themselves. They had a hard time getting the slaves to the mainland. Mrs. Sallie Henderson, her step-son, Jack and her son, Jim, and daughter, Lyde were in the Henderson house when the freshet came down upon them. They had to go up on the second floor of their house but the water ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration

... believe that I ever drank anything that seemed to go right to the spot, the way that beer did. It seemed to start a freshet of dust down my neck, clear my throat, and brace me up. While I was drinking it I noticed that the German colonel and his officers eyed me closely, my bare feet, my flannel shirt full of dust, and my hair that looked as though I had stood ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck

... been swept away by the freshet, and, in trying to cross, he missed the ford. The horse must have been frightened and unmanageable, the buggy was overturned in the creek, and your cousin, stunned by the fall, drowned instantly; life was just extinct when ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... that blow As over leagues of myrtle-blooms and may; Bevies of spring clouds trooping slow, Like matrons heavy bosomed and aglow With the mild and placid pride of increase! Nay, What makes this insolent and comely stream Of appetence, this freshet of desire (Milk from the wild breasts of the wilful Day!), Down Piccadilly dance and murmur and gleam In genial wave on wave and gyre on gyre? Why does that nymph unparalleled splash and churn The wealth of her enchanted urn Till, over-billowing all between Her ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley

... and was eyeing her somewhat awkwardly, the while wondering what kind of salutation would be suitable in her case when a startling incident happened. The river, as said, was full of floating rubbish brought down from some far-away uplands by a spring freshet while the royal convoy was making slow progress upstream and thus met it all bow on. Some of this stuff was heavy timber, and when a sudden warning cry went up from the leading boats it did not take my sailor instinct ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... says Tahnage, was conquering the spring freshet of Jordan. As a matter of fact, Jehovah transacted that little affair. See, says Talmage, "one mile ahead go two priests carrying a glittering box four feet long and two feet wide. It is the Ark of the Covenant." He forgets ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote

... boat with quick strong strokes. Thus they journeyed on in silence, save for an occasional word of endearment from one to the other, until the dawn had broken, and a few hours later they found themselves at the Malay village at which Kria lived. They had come down on a half freshet, and that, in the far upper country, where the streams tear over their pebbly or rocky beds through the gorges formed by the high banks, means travelling at a rushing headlong pace. When the fugitives finally halted at Kria's home, fifty miles ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford

... the Lady Jeanne replied brokenly. "And He has placed me and my troubles in godly hands." And then she wept. And it seemed as if like a spring freshet, her thoughts, soul, and ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe

... compact. But large bodies of cavalry, and heavy artillery, cannot venture on the ice unless it be of great thickness and strength. An army can never trust, for any length of time, to either fords or ice; if it did a freshet or a thaw would place it in a most critical state. Military bridges will, therefore, become its only safe reliance for keeping ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck

... the west and whirled the soil away to deposit it in spumy mud banks somewhere else. When the water fell low in midsummer, new sand-bars were thus exposed to dry and whiten in the August sun. Sometimes these were banked so firmly that the fury of the next freshet failed to unseat them; the little willow seedlings emerged triumphantly from the yellow froth, broke into spring leaf, shot up into summer growth, and with their mesh of roots bound together the moist sand beneath them against ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... Sister delightedly. "Early is it! Sure th' freshet co't thim all. Look, darlint, ye kin see th' drive ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White

... satire on the animal creation, as if to revenge herself on us for our sarcasms, plunged into the river, then very high by the freshet, and was wafted down the current like a bag of oats! I could hardly sit on my horse for laughter. I am apt to laugh at the vexations of my friends. The fellow, who was of my own age, and my room-mate, half checked the current by oaths as ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... wave ran up and rang Like service bells a long way off, And down a little freshet ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow

... season, but still green in all, on I journeyed—my horse and I; on, by an old saw-mill, bound down and hushed with vines, that his grating voice no more was heard; on, by a deep flume clove through snowy marble, vernal-tinted, where freshet eddies had, on each side, spun out empty chapels in the living rock; on, where Jacks-in-the-pulpit, like their Baptist namesake, preached but to the wilderness; on, where a huge, cross-grain block, fern-bedded, showed where, in forgotten times, man after man had tried to split ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville

... built in 1864, has a water-shed of 1,870 acres, and a storage capacity of 681,000,000 gallons, and an elevation of 481 feet above the City Hall. The dam of this reservoir gave way in February, 1876, during a freshet, and the immense mass of water was precipitated, with an unearthly roar, into the valley below, destroying everything in its path, and carrying rocks, earth, trees, and debris to a distance of several miles. The other, called the Holden Reservoir, is in the township of Holden. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3 • Various

... and leaves begin to fall, And the wan sunlight flits before the blast; When fields are brown and crops are garnered all, And rooks, like mastered ships, drift wide and fast; Maid Artemis, that feeleth her young blood Leap like a freshet river for the sea, Speedeth abroad with hair blown in a flood To snuff the salt west ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett

... made their lease with the Cherokees the men of the Watauga were not troubled by their Indian neighbors. They had to fear nothing more than a drought, a freshet, a forest fire, or an unusually deep snow-fall if hunting on the mountains in mid-winter. They lived in peace, hunting and farming, marrying, giving in marriage, and rearing many healthy children. By degrees they wrought out of the stubborn wilderness comfortable homes, filled with plenty. ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt

... truth—of which he was ignorant—was, that the remainder of the flotilla, borne along by the strong and deep current of the Waal, then in a state of freshet, had shot past the landing place, and had ever since been vainly struggling against wind and tide to force their way back to ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... ones died or swam away or were walled up, and new ones filled their places, and the colony thrived for a long time, and had accumulated quite a stock of lime. But, one day, there came a freshet in the Menomonee River, and piles of dirt and sand and ground-up iron ore were brought down, and all the little Favosites' mouths were filled with it. They didn't like the taste of iron, so they all died; but we know that their house was not spoiled, for we have it here. So the rock-house ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten

... again there is nothing I am more suspicious of. I once lost ten thousand dollars by nature. Nature embezzled that amount from me; absconded with ten thousand dollars' worth of my property; a plantation on this stream, swept clean away by one of those sudden shiftings of the banks in a freshet; ten thousand dollars' worth of alluvion thrown ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... mused the man. "That was the time of the big freshet. Yes, I do remember it faintly. It's the freshet I remember most though. Enough timber floated by here to build a barn. See that old shed yonder?" and he pointed to a low structure. "Well, I built that out of timber I fished ashore. Lumber yard beyond Wilmer floated into the creek, and ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman

... up his eyes, beheld In ample space under the broadest shade, A table richly spread in regal mode, With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort And savour; beasts of chase, or fowl of game, In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled, Grisamber-steamed; all fish from sea or shore Freshet or purling brook, of shell or fin, And exquisitest name, for which was drained Pontus, and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast. Alas, how simple, to these cates compared, Was that crude apple that diverted Eve! And at a stately sideboard, by the wine, That fragrant smell diffused, ...
— Milton • John Bailey

... done with the Service for ever. An accumulating current of events had swept him from his place in the Force, as an unheeding traveler crossing a mountain torrent is swept from his feet by a raging freshet. The sudden blazing of his smoldering love into a consuming flame for the clumsy country girl, for whom two years ago he had cherished a pitying affection, threw up upon the horizon of his life and into startling clearness a new and absorbing objective. In one brief ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor

... Drew his arms back, like a cricket. "Once he leaped," said old Iagoo, "Once he leaped, and lo! above him 45 Bent the sky, as ice in rivers When the waters rise beneath it; Twice he leaped, and lo! above him Cracked the sky, as ice in rivers When the freshet is at highest! 50 Thrice he leaped, and lo! above him Broke the shattered sky asunder, And he disappeared within it, And Ojeeg, the Fisher Weasel, With a bound went in behind him!" 55 "Hark you!" shouted Pau-Puk-Keewis As he entered at the doorway; "I am ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... end was one seething storm of heated, typically "Southern" argument and prophecy. Friendships were being made and broken, over questions as to whether the river had risen four inches the past hour, or only one, and as to whether this freshet were more important than the one ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... on a block and sold 'em to a man dat had come in on a steamboat, and he took dem off on it when de freshet come down and de boat could go back to Fort Smith. It was tied up at de dock at Webber's Falls about a week and we went down and talked to my aunt and brothers and sister. De brothers was Sam and Eli. Old Mistress cried jest like any of de rest ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various

... to go on now," he says, "it wouldn't better us a bit. All we'd gain by it would be the league or so from this to the river. Once there, and attempting to travel up its bank, we'd find scores of little creeks that run into it, in full freshet, and have to swim our horses across them. That would only lose time, instead of gaining it. Now, by daybreak, they'll all be down again, when we can travel straight on without being delayed by so many stoppages. I tell you, Senor ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid

... spring wherein advance seems as passive as is the progress of a log down the race of a spring freshet. Then there are other days wherein it seems that every mote must feel to the full its sentient life, and its swelling towards development or fulfilment. On a day like the latter, everything and everybody bestirs. The dust motes spin in whirling columns, the ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... from the coast. It cost him twenty thousand dollars. The first day it was open, eight hundred mules crossed at a dollar a head, to say nothing of the toll for foot and horse. That night the river rose. The bridge was one hundred and forty feet above low water mark. Yet the freshet rose higher than that, and swept the bridge away. He'd have made ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London

... never had it in for me so serious as he has now. I guess the whole show would breathe easier if I should fall off the train some dark night, when it was stormy, and we were crossing a high bridge over a stream that was out of its banks on account of a freshet. ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck

... above this lowest level is between seven and eight fathoms. If we consider the average width of the Amazon two miles, we shall have a surface of at least five thousand square miles raised fifty feet by the inundation. An extraordinary freshet is expected every ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton

... gulches, that the older men tried to dissuade us from going; but Deborah, who was very anxious to be at home by Sunday, said that the verdict was that if we started at once for our ride of twenty-three miles we might reach Onomea before the freshet came on. This might have been the case had it not been for Kaluna. Not only was his horse worn out, but nothing would induce him to lead the mule, and she went off on foraging expeditions continually, ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... structure was moored by means of a long rope to a tree a considerable distance from the water, so that in case of one of those sudden rises that sometimes took place, it would not be carried away by the freshet. The boat was quickly launched, and a few strokes of the paddle carried the two to the opposite bank of ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis

... through the deep snow, packing the compressible stuff in one passage as hard as ice. Nan followed in this narrow track to the very bank of the river where the logs were heaped in long windrows, ready to be launched into the stream when the waters should rise at the time of the spring freshet. ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr

... in round numbers, seven times that of the snow-cap. Only one-seventh of a foot of water, accordingly, could possibly be made available for their fertilisation, supposing them to get the entire advantage of the spring freshet. Upon a stint of less than two inches of water these fertile lands are expected to flourish and bear abundant crops; and since they completely enclose the polar area they are necessarily served first. The great emissaries for carrying off ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace

... Vallier coming down the St. John river was expeditious, the water being then at freshet height. At the mouth of the Madawaska, which he named St. Francois de Sales, he met a small band of savages, who pleaded for a missionary. The day following, May 17th, he came to the Grand Falls, or as he calls it "le grand Sault Saint Jean-Baptiste." His book ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond

... we sailed for a time after leaving Rotterdam, was a canal dug by the Romans to connect the Rhine and the Waal," added Mr. Fluxion. "A freshet cleaned it out, and tore away its banks so as to make the present broad river of it. In an inundation a few years later, seventy-two villages were swept away, and one hundred thousand people lost their lives. Thirty-five of these ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic

... under the Pacific Railroad; and then for twelve miles followed the windings of the Truckee River, a clear, rushing, mountain stream, in which immense pine logs had gone aground not to be floated off till the next freshet, a loud-tongued, rollicking stream of ice-cold water, on whose banks no ferns or trailers hang, and which leaves no greenness ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird

... quantities of water that they overflow their banks, and destroy much valuable property. This is called a freshet or ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes

... returning from a hard day, on which he had not only ridden his fire patrol, but had also spent a couple of hours rolling big rocks into a creek to keep it from washing out a trail should a freshet come, he found a large party of people at his camp. There was an ex-professor of social science of the old regime, his wife and little daughter, a guide, and a lavish outfit. Although the gate of Wilbur's corral was padlocked and had "Property of the U. S. Forest Service" painted on ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... a bottle of old rye." When we ask how he overcame the natural difficulties of trade—lack of commission houses, varying standards of money, want of systems of credit and low prices due to the glutting of the market when hundreds of flatboats arrived in the South simultaneously on the same freshet—we are informed that "Billy Earthquake is the geniwine, double-acting engine, and can out-run, out-swim, chaw more tobacco and spit less, drink more whiskey and keep soberer than any other man ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert

... and the distant sea. The muffled roar of these falls, rising softly through the trees on its wooded cliff, held the daily life of the people in the spell of distant music. In fair weather it soothed and charmed, and in storm and freshet rose to the ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon

... Nantucket, where, with that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common sense exterior and offered himself as a green-hand candidate for the Jeroboam's whaling voyage. They engaged him; .. but straightway upon the ship's getting out of sight of land, his insanity broke out in a freshet. He announced himself as the archangel Gabriel, and commanded the captain to jump overboard. He published his manifesto, whereby he set himself forth as the deliverer of the isles of the sea and vicar-general of all Oceanica. The unflinching earnestness ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... started now; he seemed ready enough with information to-day, and Yan knew enough to "run the rapids on the freshet." ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton

... me!" Timothy Turtle sneered. "I'll right myself as soon as there's a freshet. If there's a big enough rain the creek will rise as high as I am now. And nobody could keep me on my ...
— The Tale of Timothy Turtle • Arthur Scott Bailey

... the bed of the crick that used to run through here 'fore it was dammed a little ways up to make the ice-pond 'tween here an' Spanish Falls," supplied Peter. "Makes a durned good road, 'cept when there's a freshet. It would cost a hull lot o' money to build a road as ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon

... coming like a spring freshet," he said into the mouthpiece, "and the boys want to know if I won't let up now that Reinhart is down? Go back and smother them with all they will take down to 60. That's my answer. Tell them if Reinhart had ten more wives and daughters and they were all killed, I'd ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson

... sike^, burn, beck, creek, brook, bayou, stream, river; reach, tributary. geyser, spout, waterspout. body of water, torrent, rapids, flush, flood, swash; spring tide, high tide, full tide; bore, tidal bore, eagre^, hygre^; fresh, freshet; indraught^, reflux, undercurrent, eddy, vortex, gurge^, whirlpool, Maelstrom, regurgitation, overflow; confluence, corrivation^. wave, billow, surge, swell, ripple; anerythmon gelasma [Gr.]; beach comber, riffle [U.S.], rollers, ground swell, surf, breakers, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... length, 110 feet in height, ninety feet thick at the base, and twenty-five feet wide at the top, which was used as a driveway. For ten years or more this dam was believed to be a standing menace to the Conemaugh valley in times of freshet, though fully equal to all ordinary emergencies. With a dam which was admitted to be structurally weak and with insufficient means of discharging a surplus volume, it was feared that it was only a matter of time before such a reservoir, situated in a region ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... neighbouring villages, and turn the enemy out of all positions from which they had been operating during the construction of the bridge, and from which they could harass the passage of the force. During the night a freshet came down, the river rose fourteen feet, and the newly finished bridge was swept away. The Guides were thus isolated on the far bank, but getting no orders to the contrary, and very possibly thinking that to remain inactive was to invite unwelcome attention to their condition, Colonel ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband

... village, lying among peacefully sloping hills, away from boisterous river-courses, there was small chance of those physical convulsions which sometimes disturb the quiet of generations. The roar of a spring freshet never smote the ears of the dwellers therein, and the winters passed with no danger of avalanches. From its sheltered situation destructive storms seldom launched themselves upon it; the oldest inhabitant could remember little injury from lightning or hail ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... page of the paper still in his hand. Something of Jonathan came into his face,—the same firm lines about his mouth that his father had when he crawled under the floor timbers of the mill to save Baker's girl, pinned down and drowning, the night of the freshet. ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith

... laugh. "Look over there on the hill—see those two old locusts? They are fern palms and those scrub oaks are palmettos. The white frost makes the meadow a lagoon and this rock is the pier of my bridge where I came out to watch one night to test the force of a freshet. Over there the light from Mrs. Matilda's fires is the construction camp and beyond that hill is my bungalow. That's the same old moon that's rising relentlessly to murder the stars again. Do you want to stay and watch the ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess

... "the Dargle," or Glenislorane River, upon Lord Powerscourt's domain. This would be thought "a small specimen" of a river with us, as, except when the waters are swollen with a freshet, it is but a narrow and shallow mountain stream. But in Ireland it passes at such times for a mighty torrent, and at all times is greatly admired ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood

... them to start off on the upper trail," he declared. "I went over it but a few days ago, and at Brown's Crossing the road is all torn up by a freshet. Besides ...
— The Boy Land Boomer - Dick Arbuckle's Adventures in Oklahoma • Ralph Bonehill

... portion of the floor was a sea of red paint. The can from which it had flowed was lying on its side—near the wall. He had noticed that the smell of paint had seemed particularly pungent, but had attributed this to a new freshet of energy on the part of Lord Emsworth. He had not perceived that paint ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... "looking-up," in the language of the prices current. This was long before the time when Mr. M—— made his famous gammon speeches; but the people had a presentiment of what was coming, and to crown the eventful anticipations of the season, there was quite a freshet in Salt river. The signs were all and everywhere favorable. Speculation was beginning to chink his money-bags; three hundred new banks, as many railways, were about to be established; old things were about to fleet and disappear; all things were becoming new; and the serpent entered Charlemont, ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... bowl, Its border surrounded with rain— Sharp from the sky the tooth of Hilo's rain. Trenched is the land, scooped out by the downpour— Tossed and like gnawing surf is Hilo's rain— 10 Beach strewn with a tangle of thicket growth; A billowy freshet pours in Wailuku; Swoll'n is Wai-au, flooding the point Moku-pane; And red leaps the water of Anue-nue. A roar to heaven sends up Kolo-pule, [Page 62] 15 Shaking like thunder, mist rising like smoke. ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... The basin comes to a bottle-neck between two high hills; all you have to do is dam that narrow gorge, and when the Rio San Gregorio is up and brimming in freshet time, you'll have a lake a hundred feet deep, a mile wide, and five miles long before you know it. Did you ever consider the possibility of leading a ditch from the lake thus formed along the shoulder ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... River. It is a tributary of the Illinois. Now, though the county is named Fulton, none of the inhabitants knew anything about the inventor of steam navigation, and doubted that a steamboat existed near them. Hence the snorting, puffing, and clangor of the vessel as she surged against the freshet, alarmed all the population in hearing when ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams

... and fishing through the ice for pickerel that he sold in town. Then in the spring the floods came and the whole little family was wiped out; though the cabin, bein' built so strong, held out against the freshet, and it has ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie

... may find that hollow filled with water now, Fred," answered Jack. "Remember the heavy rains of the last few weeks have caused something of a freshet. Even down at our boathouse ...
— The Rover Boys in the Land of Luck - Stirring Adventures in the Oil Fields • Edward Stratemeyer

... struck me as decisive of the fate of my young friend Ben Mayberry. It gave me an appreciation of the tremendous irresistibility of the freshet, which must have ended the lives of the hapless party almost on the instant. The bravest swimmer would be absolutely helpless in the grasp of such a terrific current, and in a night of pitchy darkness would be unable to make the first intelligent ...
— The Telegraph Messenger Boy - The Straight Road to Success • Edward S. Ellis

... months of 1861, Judah demonstrated the existence of a route by the South Yuba River and the Donner Pass greatly superior to all other projected lines, with no insuperable engineering difficulties, and capable of defence against all interruption by freshet or snow. In the mean while the State Legislature had granted a charter to the incorporators in July; and at the first stockholders' meeting Stanford was elected president and Huntington vice-president of the company. It was evident, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... earth from the valley's slopes may have been loosened by frost and washed by freshet, and carried down to fill up the old bed of the stream, we will not stop to inquire; for other traces of this older time were also met with here. As I turned over the loose earth by the brook-side, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... multifidus, and very likely others, spread over the mud by producing runners, much after the manner of a strawberry plant. If, as in case of a freshet, the plants should be covered with water, they show their enterprise by taking advantage of the "tide"; some of the runners are quickly severed, and are then at liberty ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal



Words linked to "Freshet" :   flow, flowing



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com